What's the point of mining testnet bitcoins?

[BlackHatCoiner]

Testnet bitcoins have no value, despite the fact that they're too expensive to mine. Since they don't have value and there is no profit from mining, what's the miner's incentive?

miner8VH6WPrsQ1Fxqb7MPgJEoFYX2RCkS right now has 1,654,132 TBTC. If we assume that they have no value, then they don't. But, since people want testnet bitcoins, why don't they have value? I don't get this. Isn't this a free market? Isn't there a demand and a supply for testnet bitcoins?

[1715076474]

1715076474

[jackjack]

There has been attempts in the past to sell them, some people bought and some people made money on coins that can disappear tomorrow
Even though faucets only sends hundredths of a coins, testing a service with 1000 satoshis or 1000000000 satoshis doesn't change anything
But you're right, free market, so yeah people can choose to pay for what they want, they can even send coins to 1111111111111111111114oLvT2

[Husires]

Since they don't have value and there is no profit from mining, what's the miner's incentive?

Demand for something = value. That value does not necessarily mean a monetary reward.
You can create a free bitcoin Testnet site, the value will be in the number of visits to that site.
Some faucets offer these coins for free = the value is watching some ads or clicking on some links.
Some try to sell it and others try to use it to scam.

[vjudeu]

what's the miner's incentive?

The miner's incentive is that you can test something and show your test results to everyone else. That's all.

why don't they have value?

Because testnet creators thought that if coins will be worthless, then everyone could use them without worrying about losing some real funds. If you send all your testnet coins to some burning address, you lose nothing by doing that. No real Bitcoins are taken from your real account, you don't have to pay for it.

Isn't this a free market?

Because free market sometimes makes testnet coins valuable, we have testnet3. It was resetted two times in the past. It can be resetted at any moment. But now, it seems that we have a different approach than resetting current testnet: developers created some better test networks (like regtest or signet) and then it is assumed that testnet will naturally die. Even if testnet will be resetted tomorrow, it is P2P network, it is not that easy to kill some coin if people still want to keep it alive, the same is true for many useless altcoins. That's why testnet should die naturally, just when everyone will switch to some better test networks.

Isn't there a demand and a supply for testnet bitcoins?

Yes, it is, but because everyone knows about this "zero-value policy", nobody use testnet seriously, also because there are better alternatives.

[BrewMaster]

what's the miner's incentive?

The miner's incentive is that you can test something and show your test results to everyone else. That's all.

you test something once and then evaluate the results not continue testing until you accumulate a million coins when the reward is less than 1 TBTC (i think it is currently around 0.01 actually). which means it needs A LOT of mining.
of course there are also miners who are dedicated hashrate to keep the testnet alive. if nobody mines it the network dies.

[vjudeu]

you test something once and then evaluate the results not continue testing until you accumulate a million coins when the reward is less than 1 TBTC (i think it is currently around 0.01 actually). which means it needs A LOT of mining.

Accumulating a lot of test coins is like accumulating a lot of testing potential. You can use it for your testing or send it to anyone else (by setting up some faucet, sending it to any active address, etc., it doesn't matter). If you have many test coins, you can test many things on-chain. If you have less coins, you can always test Lightning Network or something like that and go to some smaller units than one satoshi, dividing it into smaller units as many times as needed. Or you can just choose some other test network where getting bigger amounts is easier than in testnet3.

of course there are also miners who are dedicated hashrate to keep the testnet alive

Yes, testnet also has some usage for GPU and ASIC testing, because it is very similar to mainnet and it can be used also to test if you are correctly connected. You can check if other people can also see your blocks and if they can build on top of them.

if nobody mines it the network dies

As long as it has some use cases and many people don't know about better test networks, it won't die that fast.

[suzanne5223]

Why mine TBTC? The purpose of mining TBTC is to keep the development of new Bitcoin/crypto-related project based alive, if no one mines the TBTC there will be no chance to test every new project created and it may decrease people's confidence in a crypto project.
Having said that, we said TBTC has no value but there are some people outside the forum that know its value and bought it with real BTC. I believe the holder of the 1,654,132 TBTC plan to keep for the future sake when it will be hard for people to get TBTC.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

The point of testnet coins is spelled out in their name...
They are for testing algorithms and mining software operations without endangering the main coin networks and are most often used when folks are coming up with a new shitcoin. Putting a monetary value on them defeats the whole point.

[pooya87]

Having said that, we said TBTC has no value but there are some people outside the forum that know its value and bought it with real BTC. I believe the holder of the 1,654,132 TBTC plan to keep for the future sake when it will be hard for people to get TBTC.

If that happens then the whole network will be reset easily and we move to testnet4 just like before when we moved from testnet2 to 3 because some people started to trade it at that time.
Right now there are some scarce cases of people exchanging tBTC with some shittoken hoping that token gains a value in the future but not serious enough to warrant a change.

[NotATether]

The point of testnet coins is spelled out in their name...
They are for testing algorithms and mining software operations without endangering the main coin networks and are most often used when folks are coming up with a new shitcoin. Putting a monetary value on them defeats the whole point.

There's obviously more uses for testnet coins than shitcoins, you can use them for testing wallet software, sites that accept bitcoin or pay out in it, any API that involves dealing with mainnet coins and so on. I guess that because trading with other worthless tokens is what the majority of people use them for and so few people actually use (or know enough programming to be capable of using) it for real testing, that's how testnet coins became associated with trading.

[ranochigo]

There are still some intrinsic differences with testnet and Bitcoin, they are not replicas of each other; the clients are configured to ignore standardness rules in testnet.

It's important to note that those people who are clever are not exactly mining with the difficulty that you see. Some blocks mined within the testnet actually has a difficulty of 1 instead of the difficulty as specified in the target. The difficulty is reset to 1 after a 20 minutes without any blocks. If you're able to do so, you can possibly mine quite a few testnet coins this way.

[AdolfinWolf]

Faucets who offer them can plaster their site with ads(ense), thus creating some sort of exchange rate. 1000 clicks = x $ / coins claimed = value.

Why mine TBTC? The purpose of mining TBTC is to keep the development of new Bitcoin/crypto-related project based alive, if no one mines the TBTC there will be no chance to test every new project created and it may decrease people's confidence in a crypto project.
Having said that, we said TBTC has no value but there are some people outside the forum that know its value and bought it with real BTC. I believe the holder of the 1,654,132 TBTC plan to keep for the future sake when it will be hard for people to get TBTC.

Sounds retarded. Do you have a source?

[suzanne5223]

Why mine TBTC? The purpose of mining TBTC is to keep the development of new Bitcoin/crypto-related project based alive, if no one mines the TBTC there will be no chance to test every new project created and it may decrease people's confidence in a crypto project.
Having said that, we said TBTC has no value but there are some people outside the forum that know its value and bought it with real BTC. I believe the holder of the 1,654,132 TBTC plan to keep for the future sake when it will be hard for people to get TBTC.

Sounds retarded. Do you have a source?

No, I don't. I said that footing the advantage of tBTC cause if nobody mine it, the developer may not able to test their new project but according to ETFbitcoin post any dev can create his own testnet but if no one mine tBTC what will happen?

[BlackHatCoiner]

Faucets who offer them can plaster their site with ads(ense), thus creating some sort of exchange rate. 1000 clicks = x $ / coins claimed = value.

So they do have a value. If I have 1000 TBTC, I can sell $5 each to a faucet. But mining 1 TBTC costs a lot more than $5, so the question remains. What's the point of mining TBTC?

As for the testnet4 reset, it won't be that easy as it was with testnet2. When was the last reset occured? More than 5 years ago? I don't believe that testnet miners will remain cooperative this time, because after all, they are the ones that keep testnet alive. It's a p2p network, you can't just announce that it's shut down. I don't know what happened in testnet2, but these were earlier years of bitcoin.

[ranochigo]

No, I don't.

Your sentence didn't make any sense and, pardon my assumption but I was also thinking that you were padding your word count. Whoever holds the testnet Bitcoins essentially holds nothing. The only value that it could be approximated to is the cost of mining a tBTC which is relatively negligible. If you're not looking to pay for anything, run regtest. It should suffice most use case.

What's the point of mining TBTC?

There really isn't a point to do so.

As for the testnet4 reset, it won't be that easy as it was with testnet2. When was the last reset occured? More than 5 years ago? I don't believe that testnet miners will remain cooperative this time, because after all, they are the ones that keep testnet alive. It's a p2p network, you can't just announce that it's shut down. I don't know what happened in testnet2, but these were earlier years of bitcoin.

You don't need the miners to cooperate. Testnet is not meant for production scenarios and there is no reason why you should be assuming testnet to be secure in the first place. The difficulty of the new testnet can be as low as they want. If they were to not cooperate, it'll just be another fork which no one uses.

[pooya87]

I don't believe that testnet miners will remain cooperative this time, because after all, they are the ones that keep testnet alive.

If a miner with their ASIC leaves testnet you can solo mine any block with your CPU easily in 20 minutes. So they are not keeping the testnet alive.
Also only those would refuse to leave the testnet with 0.1 tbtc block reward that were trading it, otherwise everyone else would migrate to a network with 50 tbtc block reward!